Orchestration of Global Software Engineering Projects

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges of managing global software engineering projects, emphasizing the need for effective orchestration to address cultural, linguistic, and logistical diversity, and proposes a research agenda for future work.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of global software engineering challenges and introduces a set of key questions to guide future research in project orchestration.

Findings

Global projects face increased quality, schedule, and budget challenges.

Diversity in culture, language, and time zones complicates project management.

A research agenda is proposed to address orchestration issues.

Abstract

Global software engineering has become a fact in many companies due to real necessity in practice. In contrast to co-located projects global projects face a number of additional software engineering challenges. Among them quality management has become much more difficult and schedule and budget overruns can be observed more often. Compared to co-located projects global software engineering is even more challenging due to the need for integration of different cultures, different languages, and different time zones - across companies, and across countries. The diversity of development locations on several levels seriously endangers an effective and goal-oriented progress of projects. In this position paper we discuss reasons for global development, sketch settings for distribution and views of orchestration of dislocated companies in a global project that can be seen as a "virtual project environment". We also present a collection of questions, which we consider relevant for global software engineering. The questions motivate further discussion to derive a research agenda in global software engineering.